(urth) Seal of Pas

[Gerry Quinn]

From: Lee Berman 

> > > Gerry Quinn: Bah, it’s just a credit card type number.  The only point is it has low entropy, 
> > > but it doesn’t encode anything.  Stop thinking everything is overloaded with significance
 
> > Marc Aramini: After messing with it for a while, it very well might be something of that sort.

> I don't think failure to solve is good enough evidence to dismiss this mystery. Not this one. The 
> numbers are given to us right in the text in a unique arrangement and Silk makes the sign of addition 
> over them. Where else does Wolfe do something like this? How could it not be significant?  

How could they *not* be in a unique arrangement?  And Silk would have done the same regardless of the numbers.

>From a naturalistic perspective, the numbers shouldn’t have any significance that we would understand in the story: they should encode the contents and/or date of storage, serial numbers etc.   Random numbers would not look realistic in such a context, so Wolfe doesn’t use them – he uses numbers that look compatible with such a meaning.

If they have a deeper significance, it is a game that Wolfe is playing with his readers, and he hasn’t set it up very well.  

- Gerry Quinn


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